Sunday, June 19, 2011

Wherein the author thinks she is witnessing the End of Days but discovers it's just the end of the day

The weirdest thing happened last week. I was leaving work at 5:30, heading uptown but still in Tribeca, when teams, bevies, squads of white men in dark slacks and white shirts open at the collar (it was a hot day) streamed up a side street, moving en masse toward me.

They looked similar to southern Baptist preachers (via movies) and I wondered if they were running from end-times, which, apparently, had started on Greenwich and threatened Hudson Ave. Tribeca does not have imposing skyscrapers so I didn't know what office they could possibly be coming from. (Hey. I knew they weren't missionaries; they had the blessed corruption of the less-than-sacred in them.)

If I'd been Midtown or Downtown or some other neighborhood where Fortune 500 companies had headquarters or corporate settlements, as it were, I wouldn't have been surprised, though even standing outside, say, the old Lehman Brothers (R.I.P.) wasn't the same experience as this. Every other office I'd worked in had lower and higher level workers in the mix, the mail team, the proofreaders, the cafeteria crew, the assistant; non-whites and women.

The next day at lunch I kept an eye out, and the day after I found myself surrounded by some of their homogeneous midst when I got take-out on Beach St. I still had no clue and was reluctant to inquire after their origin. The day after, I happened to amble down to Greenwich at lunch and observed their like yet again, looked over to see an odd building hidden between apartment structures. It was a corporate Citibank outpost.

Mystery over, they were bankers and traders, maybe in a trainee incarnation. No mystery, but still the odd image of clones or pod people, evolving. Night of the dead living. Each person is an individual but group the persons together and isolate the group, make it all of one type, and it gets weird. My father had his weirdness, but not that weirdness, hallelujah.